


like the light

by h0ldthiscat



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: F/M, i get SAD! you know i get sad and i can't look past what i'm sad about
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-27 22:20:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30129684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/h0ldthiscat/pseuds/h0ldthiscat
Summary: A year ago a lot of things would have been unthinkable.
Relationships: Jimmy McGill | Saul Goodman/Kim Wexler
Comments: 13
Kudos: 26





	like the light

Kim groans against his jaw, the sensation reverberating in his bones and making his skull rattle. It takes him a few seconds to register that his cell phone is ringing, skittering across the dashboard of his car, as Kim tears her lips away from his. 

“Who is it?” he rasps as she reaches for the device.

She reads off the seven digit phone number, quirking an eyebrow at the end. “Ring any bells?”

“No, but it’s probably a client,” Jimmy says, taking it from her. He flips open the phone but before he answers, asks, “Hey, what if I got one of those messaging services? Like a little old British lady? Make me sound real professional, right? ‘Kindly leave your number’, that kind of thing?”

“Why don’t you do the voice, sounds like you already have a pretty good handle on it,” she teases. Her upper lip is red from friction against his, eyes shining even in the dim glow of the lights in her parking lot.

He chuffs out a laugh and answers. “Jimmy McGill.”

Chuck’s voice comes through, breathing labored, tone grating. “Jimmy. Rebecca’s in town on Friday. Need to talk. Now.” Then silence.

Jimmy’s tongue feels thick in his mouth. He closes his phone and stares at it for a moment, resting in the palm of his hand. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Kim tilt her head. 

“That was uh, Chuck,” he says.

Kim’s brow knits. “On the phone?”

“Yeah, something with Rebecca, apparently. I gotta get over there, I--” He turns and looks guiltily at Kim. “I’m screwing this all up, aren’t I?”

“Screwing what up?” she teases. Then her face softens. “If Chuck needs something, you should go. Really, I’ll be okay.” 

“Okay,” he agrees reluctantly. 

She’d been so handsy at the drive-in, teasing him through his jeans, her shirt unbuttoned one more button than usual. Every touch of her hands on his skin was electricity, the pads of her fingers activating the fire in his veins. She crackles beside him now, gathering her purse from the floorboard and her large soda from the console between them. 

“I owe you one,” he mumbles.

She lets out a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh and kisses the corner of his mouth. “Sure,” she says. She pauses, seeing the look on his face. “I’ll see you in a couple days, yeah?”

“Yeah, see you then,” Jimmy agrees. He gives her elbow a squeeze and then she’s gone, the passenger door closing behind her. He watches as she climbs the stairs to her third-floor apartment and gives a little wave he knows she can’t see before she opens the door and disappears from view.

Jimmy turns the key and his Esteem splutters to life, something in the undercarriage rattling as he turns out of Kim’s parking lot and onto the main road. Had Chuck walked to a payphone in town? Was he with Howard, was that Howard’s number that had flashed across his cell? Jimmy himself hasn’t seen Rebecca in years, even though she’d only moved an hour away after the divorce. 

He pulls up to a stoplight and slurps down the dregs of his own soda, which he’d ordered preemptively hoping he and Kim would have a late night ahead of them. Now, after Chuck’s, he’ll return to the nail salon alone and stare at the ceiling until at least 2:30 or 3 with caffeine and unspent adrenaline coursing through his veins. 

The sky darkens as he drives away from the center of town, stars bright in Chuck’s neighborhood with its few yellow street lamps. He’ll never forget those first few nights in Albuquerque, the sky so wide it seemed like someone had unzipped it, the world’s largest piece of fabric stretching from horizon to horizon. So many variegated blacks and blues, it seemed like they could swallow him up if he let them. 

Behind him, someone honks, and Jimmy realizes he’s been sitting at the stop sign at the end of Chuck’s street for a full minute. He raises a hand and accelerates the rest of the way down the street, parking outside the familiar mailbox. 

___________________

Jimmy tries to think if Chuck has ever asked for his help before. A year ago, his brother hadn’t so much asked for Jimmy to bring him groceries every day as Jimmy had offered, but with Chuck there was always a sense of obligation. And he’s not unaware of his desire to prove he could be better than the man Chuck thought he was. But Chuck asking for his help to lie to Rebecca? Even a year ago it would have been unthinkable. 

But a year ago a lot of things would have been unthinkable. He didn’t think he’d be living in a nail salon. He didn’t think his brother’s leave of absence was anything other than a reaction to stress from the divorce. A year ago he’d never thought of Chuck as anything other than monolithic, a pillar of justice--literally and figuratively. 

His phone chirps beside him, and this time he recognizes the number scrolling across the screen. 

“Hey, thought I scared you off.”

Kim chuckles over the line. “I finished crying into my hanky but I’m okay now.”

“Glad to hear it. What’s up?”

There’s a pause on her end and then she says, “You get a tv in your new place yet? Because one of your favorites is on TCM right now.”

Jimmy clears his throat, looks around at the dark back room of the nail salon. “Uh, no, still looking. Wanna make sure I get the best bang for my buck, you know?”

“Yeah, of course.” He hears something rustling, pictures her shifting in bed. “I can’t believe the movers are refusing to pay for the one they broke.”

“I know, people have no integrity these days.”

“You sure you don’t want a big bad lawyer to slap them with some paperwork?” Kim offers, her voice dropping low.

Jimmy chuckles and feels his boxers getting tighter. “Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when I need the big guns.” 

“Hey, what’d Chuck want?” she asks suddenly, voice bright again. 

He stares at the ceiling, his suits hanging like ghosts on the pipe above him. Why hadn’t he gone straight back to Kim’s after he’d left Chuck’s? Why hadn’t he shown up at her door with some snappy line, like Cary Grant in one of those movies she loves so much? 

Over the line, her voice falters. “Are--are you there?”

“Yeah I’m here. He uh… Rebecca’s coming into town next week and he wants me to help him get the house ready for her.”

“Oh. Wow.” He hears her shifting again, imagines her beside him with her foot cold against his calf. “How bad is it? The house.”

Jimmy shrugs. “Could be worse. He needs a bunch of stuff hooked up again. He’s got wires all over the place, so I’ll have to call someone to look at that. The yard has seen better days, but I can probably knock that out myself.”

“Don’t you have like three hearings this week?” Kim chuffs.

“Yeah, but--” Jimmy looks to the growing pile of case folders on his desk. With as busy as he looks he hoped he’d be getting paid more. “Small potatoes,” he assures Kim. “One kid has an uncle who’s a cop in Los Lunas, so I think I’ve got that one in the bag.”

“Alright,” Kim says, and he can picture the straight-mouthed frown on her face when she says, “Be careful, Jimmy.”

He doesn’t have time to ask what she means before she gives a half-hearted yawn and he offers to let her go. As he expected, he spends the next several hours awake. When he finally sleeps, he dreams that the stack of folders on his desk has grown so large it forms a tent, beige against the blue-black Albuquerque sky. He and Kim go camping. 

/////

Kim’s hands shake with excitement as she gathers her materials from the counsel table. Howard’s perfunctory, “Nice work, Kim,” is the closest it gets to outright praise and she’d really wanted it on this one. He leaves the courtroom quickly, hurrying to another meeting, but she stays to watch the opposing counsel slink off. 

When she exits the courtroom a few minutes later, a boy is sitting on the bench in the hallway, a scowl on his face. He looks familiar, but she can’t quite place him until the door to the courtroom swings open and the bailiff barks, “Fernandez? Your lawyer here yet?”

“No,” the boy snaps. 

“Five more minutes,” the bailiff replies, and returns inside.

The name _Fernandez, Tyler_ swims before Kim’s eyes: scrawled on the outside of a case folder stacked in the back of Jimmy’s car. He’s one of Jimmy’s PD clients. 

“Tyler?” She approaches him cautiously for some reason, like someone will see her talking to a client that’s not hers and take away her law license. 

“What?” the kid snaps. When he meets her face she sees he can’t be older than twenty, freckles around a pair of dark eyes that swim with anger.

She takes a breath and hears herself say, “Your lawyer Jimmy isn’t able to make it to court today and he sent me instead.”

Tyler sucks his teeth. “Yeah, sure. Like you know anything about me and my case.”

“It’s just for today. I’m going to ask the judge if you can get what’s called a continuance. It means you’ll be back in court with Jimmy on a different day, probably not until next month. You think you can do that?”

“I took off work for this, man,” Tyler groans, slumping back on the bench. “Now I gotta do it again?”

“Don’t break the law next time,” Kim says. “Now come on, they’re not gonna wait for you forever.”

Tyler sighs and reluctantly follows Kim into the courtroom. When she opens her mouth to speak, she feels her pulse thrumming in her throat.

_________________

Howard easily buys her excuse of traffic, but now at least there’s a reason she’s at her desk well after nightfall. Her heels long abandoned, she rubs her bare feet together as she stretches and wonders just how much more case law she can pore over before it actually starts to become meaningless to her.

Her cell phone sits on her desk, glinting dully under her lamp. It’s not like him not to call her back. Especially after she left two messages. Kim sighs and picks up her phone before she can stop herself. She only lets it ring a few times before hanging up. He’s fine, she’s sure he’s fine. But she digs around her desk drawer for the piece of paper where he’d scrawled his new address and grabs her keys anyway. 

__________________

The banner outside says DAY SPA & NAIL and she thinks he must have written it down wrong. But there’s nothing else nearby, just these few storefronts and a Del Taco across the street. His car is parked a few spots over, unmistakable, and she realizes this must be the place. 

Kim parks and walks up to the windows, cupping a hand against her brow bone trying to see inside past the glare of the street light in the parking lot. And there, towards the back, pacing in his boxers and a white t-shirt in front of a row of massage chairs, is Jimmy. Her heart drops. She shouldn’t have come here. It’s a huge invasion of privacy and they’re not--she isn’t-- 

She watches Jimmy rub a hand across his face and before she can stop herself, she taps on the window with her knuckles. He jumps, and when his eyes meet hers, for the first time in the near decade that she’s known him, his expression is unreadable. He moves towards the front door like he’s in a trance and lets her in wordlessly. Kim follows him, his shoulders slumped, past the massage chairs and down a hallway with a naked lightbulb. 

Jimmy pushes open an unmarked door and she notices the water heater before she notices his desk. 

“This is where the magic happens,” he says, his voice gravelly. He gestures to the couch and she perches awkwardly, trying not to make it obvious how shocked she is.

“You should put a sign on the door,” she says after a moment, trying to be lighthearted.

Jimmy doesn’t respond, taking a sip out of a plastic cup. He’s somewhere else right now, in a world all his own.

“If you want me to go I can go, I didn’t mean to intrude,” Kim offers. “I just wanted--I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Another long minute goes by. Finally, he says, “Thank you, by the way. My client today. You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know,” she says, voice thready. “I wanted to.”

“Kim, you don’t--”

“I know,” she whispers now, because she doesn’t trust herself to speak full voice without crying. She sniffs. “How was Rebecca?”

Jimmy shakes his head and stares into his cup, a hangdog look on his face. “Chuck is uh--he’s… Do I sound stupid if I say I thought he’d be better by now?”

She can’t bear this, it’s finally too much, and she rises from the couch and goes to him, gripping his arms just above his elbows and pressing her forehead to his. “Jimmy…” she whispers. 

He’s so close she can feel his pulse, smell the vodka on his breath and in his plastic cup. And she wants to say, _please,_ she wants to say, _why didn’t you tell me?_ She wants to kiss him, to fuck him right here on this couch that’s probably his bed and tell him, _we’re the same. You’re like me._

She puts a hand to his cheek and brushes her thumb across the bone, willing him to look her in the eyes. He turns his head slightly to place a kiss in the center of her palm, but when their foreheads part his eyes are stone and his jaw is set. The curtain is drawn.


End file.
